It’s a few minutes shy of 8 p.m. when we tee off at Whitehorse’s Mountain View Golf Course, and almost immediately we sense that strange things are being done. Realistically, the very concept of golf under the midnight sun is strange. And, typically, this activity involves an equally strange place. In Iceland, it’s played on a course known to employ sputtering lava as an indisputable hazard; in Yellowknife, it involves hauling around a mat to set down on the tundra before you strike your ball. You get the picture.

The evening before, a few kilometres away at Annie Lake, we’d sampled not just late-night golf but late-night pasture golf, where, for a clatter of loonies dropped into a steel box, you get to try out your $700 driver on a field that would make the gnarliest links in all of Scotland seem over-manicured. Parked along the perimeter of what might more properly have been a muskox paddock were camperized pickups and 12-year-old Tempos with tents pitched beside them. Mosquito-swatting aficionados clustered around bonfires discussing the finer points of gravel play and congratulating themselves on having discovered the cheapest golf vacation in history.

By contrast, the Mountain View wouldn’t be out of place in some southern cottage country. The pro shop stocks everything you’d ever need and comes complete with an actual pro. The lush fairways are lined with birch and conifers, and the greens, while measuring maybe four on the stimpmeter (watch for passing turtles and snails, in other words), are indisputably green. There’s even the mandatory beer cart, piloted by an attractive young person. The attractive young person is, of course, also mandatory.

Heading down the first fairway, the shadows cast by our normally normal twosome have us looking like Ernie Els and Michelle Wie. Sadly, we do not play like them. Both Jessie and I have pulled our opening drives into the trees and wonder if we’ll even find the damn balls. But at the appropriate stand of timber, we soon spot a dimpled white sphere – then another, and another, and another. Jessie is overcome by the bounty. Sometimes when unknowing friends express amazement at how I can get so much pleasure from such a stupid game, I enlighten them by explaining that each of us is a different breed of dog. I happen to be one of the ball-chasing types; Jessie belongs to a ball-chasing breed as well, but hers has also been selected for the ball- finding gene. She doesn’t know it yet, but there will be more doggie treats ahead.